As I kid, I was scared of monsters. Specifically, the Star Trek Salt-Vampire and Hans Christian Anderson’s Death, sitting on the Emperor’s chest. (I slept on my side for years after reading “The Nightingale.” Death couldn’t get you, I reasoned, if you declined him a seat.) But I was never afraid of the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are, the best-known book by Maurice Sendak, who diedonTuesday.

I saw my wife, Judy, cringe the first time she read the children's book Noah's Ark to our son, Nathanael. "A long time ago there lived a man called Noah. Noah was a good man, who trusted in God. There were also many wicked people in the world.

Pauline Baynes died on August 1 at the age of 85—one more light gone out from the golden age of children’s book illustration, an age that gave us Arthur Rackham’s fairies, Edmund Dulac’s Cinderella, Beatrix Potter’s spirited rabbits and E. H. Shepard’s Toad and Pooh.

Henkes observes the changes that occur over one day to four animals living in a little girl’s backyard. Sometimes it’s only the smallest little thing—a falling feather, a tangled leash—that changes. Henkes’s luminous watercolors say to readers, young and old: be patient. Sometimes a tiny change makes all the difference.

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